How to Decorate a Tree
Here's something I wrote a few years back about Christmas trees and new traditions. It's a little old but still fits more or less. May it give you a few moments of distraction as you head toward family or as they head toward you.
Before the year goes out all shiny and loud, I wanted to wish you well and to say thank you for subscribing to this little corner of the internet.
Happy & Merry
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Christmas tree business in New York takes place right out on the street. Seasonal sellers colonize a corner around Thanksgiving, narrowing the walk with netted up trees leaning against fences and walls and each other. It’s a brilliant strategy; the usual trip to work or to buy milk requires walking through these makeshift forests. Parents in particular linger in them, their children pointing out favorites from strollers while a seller stands close, ready to suggest paying a little more for a Douglas if they want the thing to last. I loved the smell of pine pitch in the cold, and my wife and I liked to imagine the apartments with ceilings that could accommodate the tallest trees on the lot, easily over twelve feet.
Before we stood in the trees with our own kids, we didn’t really have the room or budget for a tree. But Christmas Day, these seasonal sellers moved on or back to wherever they came from, ideally with little left over, which meant that a Christmas Eve tree could be easily bargained into our tight living room. We didn’t worry much about height or body; it was the having of the thing rather than the thing itself that sent us hunting. Most of those early trees fit on a counter or end table and stayed as bare as they were on the street until I returned them there.
When I was young but old enough to remember, we would earn our trees from a field on the edge of town owned and worked by a good family friend. Kansas Decembers meant snow, and my brother and I would struggle on coveralls and ski masks while dad waited for us in the red Jeep CJ7 that never quite got warm. We couldn’t run the yard to the Jeep without throwing snow at each other. My older brother sat in front.
The cedars we culled each year stood in a little crowd surrounded by open farmland. I still don’t know why they were kept that way — maybe the hill’s grade wasn’t kind to tractors. Drifts over the tilled-under dirt made the field into a fallen swatch of moon. Dad would break the ditch snow with the Jeep and drive right out onto the field. If we looked closely, we could see tracks left by coyotes and deer, probably looking for each other.
I said a couple of paragraphs back that we earned our trees, and I meant it. Dad would pick a good one, and sweep away the snow to take it as low as possible. We would all then take turns slowly felling it with the old, orange bow saw. Dad taught us to start bringing the tree down on the pull; push first and the long teeth bounce and gouge. Done right it was still hard going, even for the small trunks. With the saw on its side and low to the earth, it’s tough to keep the ribbon of blade flat, especially when your arm starts to burn and the saw chokes on its own cut. But between the three of us, our hands creased from cold and work, we could get the tree down and then up on the Jeep top. My brother and I would help hold (or at least we thought we were helping hold) it steady while Dad fixed it down with complicated knots that I never did learn to tie.
Becoming parents ourselves in New York, a place so different from where we both grew up, sent my wife and I looking for a new tradition. One year we picked up a tree from a local market where we bought our fruit. You could tell they weren’t that serious about the season, but they offered what looked to be a few decent trees, clustered against the outside wall where they sold flowers in the warmer months. We asked around inside, and we were directed to a young man in a butcher’s smock, who led us back out, carrying a small rip saw. We asked his advice because we felt we owed him the question, and he pointed to a tree in a way that revealed he knew more about meat than firs. We all nodded. He laid the tree down over the subway vent, the trunk end jutting into the street, and began to saw about four inches off the bottom. It was hard going, the tool not quite up to the job, and the tree shuddered as he struggled with the cut. “We really need a bow saw,” I said. I aimed to be more quiet and helpful, and I knelt on the branches near the work end to keep the tree still, and the kids joined me a little further up. Finally, the disk of trunk came off, and we all stood up satisfied. The young man said, “In my religion, when we sacrifice a bull, we cut the throat, and many people hold it down just like that.” The four of us walked home with that thought in our heads and the tree on our shoulders as if returning from a successful hunt.
Traditions emerge out of repetition, the doing of the same thing year after year around roughly the same time. They make up the clock face of lives, the marks we swing back around to each year. It’s nice knowing when and where you are.
Now we fetch our trees from across the river in New Jersey, mainly as an excuse to spend time with our good friends. As a bonus, we also avoid the gouging provided by the seasonal tree hawkers in Tribeca, a downtown New York neighborhood close to ours of fairly to insanely wealthy people.
We’ve known these friends since before any of us had children and before we called each other husbands and wives. And these are the friends who gave our kids their first night away from us when my wife and I were in California putting her mother to rest. Our daughter and son have grown up with their kids and always look up and forward to them.
These visits to our friends’ house have revealed the future. They have two boys and two girls and a house’s worth of place to explore, and once inside, our girl and boy disabuse themselves of us as quickly as their coats. My wife and I are fine with that since we’re left to be adults with adults. Most people that we came to know in New York have gone on to houses in other states, and we don’t have much chance to act our age, by which I mean both younger and older than parenthood usually allows.
After the kids hatch and execute several schemes in the basement, we go out for lunch. Again, my wife and I get treated to a strange sensation: Our kids ride with their friends, and left with nothing in the car but me and the quiet, my wife almost falls asleep. I never take it personally. Then burgers and sandwiches and suburb-sized scoops of ice cream, and only then do we go in search of a Christmas tree.
We follow our friends (and our kids) to a large garden center selling trees mysteriously from Oregon. They have an enormous number of them, rowed and columned into a good-sized forest with cedar-chip paths. But unlike any other place I’ve been, they suspend the trees from ropes on beams, which means they fill out full, and they spin. The kids realize right away that they’re surrounded by a bunch of 8-foot tops, and they run up and down the rows, grabbing branches, whirling the trees and themselves. They never see their breath fog in the cold, and they warm me, too.
My wife and I pick one at random that will just make our ceiling, and a compact man loosens the tree’s knot, helps it down and then up onto our rented roof. We don’t need a saw. Though the kids are anxious to decorate at home, we have to lead them out of the odd forest and into the car, and back to the corner where the tree always sits.
This year our tree was so big that our stand, bought with a seller’s last pine on a Christmas Eve over a decade ago, couldn’t accommodate the trunk, and the kids have to go to bed with just a promise to decorate. We need to get the tree up and in water before the sap seals the fresh cut and the tree heals itself to death. After our son and daughter have finally gone quiet in their room, I go out to the Tribeca tree hawkers stamping and joking against the cold. On my way home from paying only a little too much for a new stand, it begins to snow, the flakes small and perfect like memories.
I hope that some of them will stick.